This game. My god, this game. My original intent was to talk about Lux-Pain (which I seem to have lost. It shall be spared my derisive comments... this time), but this game... this game. I do not even know what I can say about it. It's bad. It's bad on a level I have never before experienced. I kind of joked about The Bouncer being "So Bad It's Good," but this... this is so bad it's horrible. And the only way I even remotely gained any entertainment value out of this is because of my love of terrible movies. The only kind of person who would enjoy this game is the kind who has Plan 9 From Outer Space on DVD next to their copy of Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter. I am one such person.
Let me start off by telling you what I know about this game. It is a sequel to a game in 2004 that was just called ObsCure. I have not played this game, nor do I care to. This game was released for the PC, PS2 and Wii. I played the Wii version. This game was given to me by a friend. After showing her this blog, she commented that I might enjoy ripping this game apart because it is so bad. I played it with her and that scary lady who lets me call her my girlfriend. The absolute stupidity that was displayed on the screen made this an enjoyable experience. She gave me this game, because she doesn't want it and like hell would I ever PAY for this.
Now, let me tell you about the plot. There isn't one. Don't get me wrong, there are some people, and things happen to them, but the coherence of storytelling that the word "plot" implies is far too generous for this game. But there are some stupid college kids who start making drugs from this random, never before seen plant that just showed up on their campus and take them. It's beyond me how none of the faculty notice these plants, because they are HUGE AND CONSPICUOUS, growing on the walls of Frat Houses and random dorm buildings. I will gladly accept that the first thing frat boys would do with a mysterious plant that starts growing is smoke the fuck out of it and see what happens, but I would think some faculty would show concern for this mysterious organism and, I don't know, call the CDC or the FDA or something. And as it turns out, this plant makes you have nightmarish acid trips that make you think you might actually be in a good game. And then, it turns you into a horrible monster. Some of them look like these big angry dog things with Cthulhu faces, while others are SO INCREDIBLY FAT that they put Left 4 Dead's Boomers to shame. And the only way to stop this transformation is, apparently, energy drinks. If you drink an energy drink in the early stages, you don't transform, which is why most of the cast is still alive.
This makes me wonder how ANY of the monsters come to be in the first place. Because, uh, on my campus, the ones doing the drugs are also the ones chugging down Red Bull and Monster like caffeine was the only thing stopping the spiders from coming back.
I should mention, ObsCure is supposed to be a Survival Horror game, which is not a favored genre of mine, but also not one I am unfamiliar with. Survival horror games are meant to isolate you, make you feel alienated, uncomfortable and crush 99.9% of hope, while preserving that one sliver of light at the end of the tunnel to get you through the game, even when everything seems hopeless. The crucial part of survival horror is not exactly to scare you right out with things jumping out from around corners, but to unsettle you and make you uncomfortable, slowly building up to the fear.
To add to that, enemies in these games tend to be scary because combat in Survival Horror games is not really your first priority. Your first priority is to SURVIVE, which usually means avoiding enemies, if you can. Games have different approaches to this. Resident Evil, probably the most well-known example of the genre, gives players guns but limited ammunition. The fear of running out of bullets when a zombie dog is staring you down is a good way to do this sort of thing. Though, they kind of stopped the limited ammo thing with Resident Evil 4. But anyway, getting off track.
Resident Evil 4 isn't a survival horror game. Because how can you possibly scared when you're playing as Leon Scott Kennedy?
Another important aspect of these games are the characters. Silent Hill games tend to have average, everyday people tossed into the hellhole that is Silent Hill. Resident Evil tends to opt to make the player a member of Elite Special Forces or some such thing. Regardless of what the game picks, you have to like the character because you're stuck with them. Even if there are supporting characters, they can frequently be killed off and leave you by yourself. The short of it is, the major part of Survival Horror games is making the player feel vulnerable and alone.
I have gone into such detail with these aspects because I feel they are necessary to understand why everything about ObsCure: The Aftermath is so goddamn wrong. First off, it's a two player game. Yes, you read that right. You can play by yourself with the computer, but there will ALWAYS be someone with you at ALL TIMES. You are NEVER ALONE in this game. You always have a partner beside you and frequently have to switch to use their unique "skills". For example, one guy is an acrobat and can jump and climb to higher places, while one girl can "hack" just about anything, regardless of how little sense it makes. One girl has "decryption" which is totally different from hacking. Totally. It doesn't exactly sound like it should be, but she can basically just see patterns in things to help solve puzzles and determine where to go. And for many sections of the game, you can go back to an area and switch one member of your two-person party out for another, to use their skills.
Yes. They are using a goddamn RPG Party System. Ugggh, there is SO MUCH WRONG HERE. But I shall press on.
The characters. Oh, the characters. In video games, there's only really a few kinds of protagonists that work well and that pool is even smaller for survival horror game. Survival horror, after all, needs you to feel exposed and vulnerable. So they have to be someone you can either identify with and sympathize with... or they have to be engaging in some way. Silent Hill tends to have the former, while Resident Evil has the special forces. Yes, they're cops and badass ones at that, but for the most part, they're still not mentally equipped to deal with the living dead. Granted, by the time Leon Scott Kennedy is spin-kicking Parasite-Infected Spaniards in the face so hard, their heads explode, this is not exactly the case. But then again, Resident Evil 4 is not survival horror, so moving on.
In ObsCure, your party consists of a bunch of bland and utterly generic college students. They're all stoners, have personalities lifted from an after-school special, and are, frankly, far too dumb to live. I'm surprised their brains even have the ability to process the chemicals needed to experience a high, because I refuse to believe they have more than two functioning brain cells among their collective group. They are all bland, uninteresting, unoriginal and STUPID. They are stupid, stupid, STUPID. They are so incredibly dumb, I find it hard to believe that any self-respecting learning institution would actually accept them. I guess it's a community college... in Stupidville.
I don't feel like I need to add anything to this.
My best guess is that they were going for a slasher movie feel. Like Friday the 13th, where Jason Voorhees comes out and slaughters all the teenagers, because he is secretly a supporter of eugenics and is on a god-given mission to cleanse the gene pool of all the rampant STUPID before any of them have a chance to reproduce. At least, I'd like to think so. But yeah, that's the feel I get. And that brings me to another problem.
Have you ever in your life been watching a horror movie, specifically a slasher flick, and looked at the jock or the cheerleader, about to get a machete through their stupidly pretty faces and thought to yourself "Gee, I'd really like to be in their shoes right about now."?
The answer to this question is no. No, you have NEVER wanted to be the stupid teenager getting murdered by the lakeside. No one does. But that's what ObsCure does. It puts you in the shoes of the idiots who are only good for getting killed and god dammit, it doesn't even kill them enough. As of writing this review, I played through about 2-3 hours of the game. I intend to write more of these as I play through more of the game, but I can only take so much of this at a time and thus they will be fairly sporadic. But anyway, yeah. None of them died. In fact, there was only one thing that got me to keep trudging through this game.
The fact that you can beat the shit out of your partner. Most of the weapons you use are melee weapons. You can pull them out whenever. And you can beat the everloving shit out of Player 2. And the noises they make are HILARIOUS. When I was playing this, my girlfriend was watching me and laughing hysterically whenever I found new ways to brutalize the computer. An observer to this might have made the mistake that the game was actually fun. Now, beating up the other player sounds sadistic, but think about it. You watch a movie like Friday the 13th to see Jason stab some teenagers, so why shouldn't you enjoy something like this? And the best part is, they take no damage! When you get the chainsaw, there are buzzing and revving sounds as you BZZZZZ and whack them with it, but they only fall over and say things like "Ow! You're such a jerk!". There were many more funnier ones, but they escape me at the moment. This, plus the laughably bad dialogue and C-Grade voice acting make it enjoyable for the sheer spectacle of stupidity. It's what I was playing for.
There are so many other problems I could go into that just make this a truly bad game. The graphics are pretty terrible, even by Wii standards. They remind me of early PS2 games during game play and the pre-rendered cutscenes (which are horribly, horribly compressed and make the game look like I'm playing it on an TV/VCR Combo from the 90s, even when it's in 480p on a plasma screen) are more like late PS1 pre-rendered cutscenes. They're ugly and the people are stupid looking and move unnaturally. The enemies look and move stupidly and are just badly designed. The flying harpy things are almost impossible to fight without a gun and they ALWAYS come in packs from 3-5, which will almost always drain all your ammo despite how weak they are. Oh, and by the way. These harpies? They... it's like they have a mouth where their crotch is and it has teeth. And they fly at your face. And their legs also have teeth. My girlfriend called them Vagina Harpies. Yeah. And still, they're not scary because of how STUPID that is. Nothing is scary in this game. It's all just stupid.
Oh, and the controls. I have been waiting this entire review to mention these. This being a Wii game, it makes utterly unnecessary use of the motion controls, which is par for the course. But... and this is what truly made me hate it... the Wiimote controls the camera. Where you point the Wiimote is where the camera aims. It will ALWAYS do this, sometimes even when you're swinging to hit things with a bat. It's ungodly. Also, it puts a little mote of white light where you're pointing, which I like to circle around their little heads while going "Hey! Listen!". It amuses me.
But that's about all for now. The next time I do this, whenever that may be, I will go into more detail on the stupid events of the game and ObsCure's sad attempt at a Pyramid Head.
Yeah, I wasn't getting through this review without mentioning Pyramid Head and we all knew it.
No comments:
Post a Comment